Monday, July 11, 2011

Extending VLAN cpabilities to VMWare

I have been looking for a solution to have multiple VLANs on the VMWare ESXi server. The server which was allocated to the VMs had only 4 NIC's and we had to setup virtual servers from 5 VLANs. The solution was described in the VMWare ESXi documentation as well. The terminology is called VST (Virtual Switch Tagging).

Since we had 4 NIC ports we connected 3 links from the switch as trunk ports (dot1q, need to make the switch configuration) initially. The other port is kept for the VMWare ESXi management access. This is important to setup the VST in the ESXi server via the vSphere client. Once the ESXi is setup you can include this port also to the NIC load balance team. Following is the list of activities to perform.

Connect to the ESXi server via vSphere Client

Select the server from the left pane and Navigate to the configuration tab

Click on networking under hardware pane

Then click properties > select the VM Network and hit edit

On General tab, change VLAN ID to All(4095)

Navigate to NIC Teaming tab and tick the load balancing and select the first option from the drop down list

Click OK and exit

Now click on Add and create VLAN ID's for Virtual Machine traffic for each VLAN (You need to get the VLAN ID's from the network personnel)

Now you can assign these to relevant virtual machine for connectivity to their respective VLAN's